By organizing this information and delivering it into the hands of activists and law makers, we can form an immense tool to help existing and future campaigns around the world -- Ciaran O'Riordan, Director End Software Patents.

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Monday, February 23rd, 2009 -- The
Free Software Foundation today announced funding for the End Software
Patents project to document the case for ending software patents
worldwide. This catalog of
studies, economic arguments, and legal analyses will build on the
recent
success of the "in re Bilski" court ruling, in which End Software Patents
(ESP) helped play a key role in narrowing the scope for patenting software
ideas in the USA.

For this new phase of End Software Patents work, the FSF has engaged veteran
anti-software-patent lobbyist Ciaran O'Riordan, taking over from Ben
Klemens as director of ESP. O'Riordan brings years of experience
campaigning against software patents in the EU. This knowledge,
combined with what was learned during the Bilski work, will form the
starting point for a global information resource and campaign. The goal is to make it
easy for activists around the world to benefit from existing
knowledge, often scattered and sometimes disappearing with time.

O'Riordan explained, "Each campaign raises new evidence and arguments for the
case against software patents. The work on the Bilski case uncovered new economic
studies and developed legal proposals for how to pin down the slippery goal
of excluding software ideas from patentability. To make the most of that
work, Phase II of ESP will work on documenting and organizing that
information and making it easily reusable. We'll add to that what was
learned during the years-long campaign against the EU software patents
directive, and then we'll research and document what's happening in South
Africa, India, New Zealand, Brazil, and so forth."

In recent years, some of the largest technology companies have led a
charge to register tens of thousands of software patents in an apparent
attempt to stifle competition and threaten software users. To counter
those efforts O'Riordan explained the work the campaign will undertake,
"We have the arguments and the studies to show how software patents
harm
competition, choice, innovation, SMEs, standards, and entrepreneurs. We
can
show that by blocking individuals and communities from participating in
software development, software patents impede a very important
activity. We've seen how inefficient, slow, and costly the patent
system is
-- how incompatible it is with software development timelines.

"There's a mountain of information, but a bottleneck is that much of
it is contained in electronic archives -- sometimes public, sometimes
private -- and in news stories, and unmaintained websites. By
organizing this information and delivering it into the hands of activists and law makers, we can form an immense tool to help
existing and future campaigns around the world."

"While other online resources focus on exposing and fighting individual bad
software patents, we will be continuing our broader approach of working to see
the entire system reformed so that patent offices no longer grant patents for
software ideas. Until that happens, there will always be new
mosquitoes to swat, and software developers and users will continue to be
intimidated by the possibility of legal actions."

About End Software Patents

End Software Patents is a project formed to eliminate patents for
software and other designs with no physically innovative step. End
Software Patents is funded by donations to the Free Software
Foundation. For more information on participating in the project, or to
access its knowledge base, please visit its website at
http://endsoftpatents.org.

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting
computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer
programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom)
software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants --
and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread
awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of
software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important
source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can
be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.